


The Woods Know Him

by Strawberry_Sweetheart



Series: Forest Spirit Steve [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Child Neglect, I’m trying to set the foundation of the story bare with me, M/M, Postpartum Depression, The first story was how billy ending up frolicking in the woods, a bit of angst but much more kid Steve being adorable, kid! Steve, this I is how Steve ended up frolicking in the woods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:20:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22668430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strawberry_Sweetheart/pseuds/Strawberry_Sweetheart
Summary: Steve was raised by the woods his whole life. He knows the woods well and the woods know him.As a toddler, left unwatched by preoccupied parents, he’d stumble with chubby little baby legs, unbalanced and adventurous, across the property line and into the line of trees, following the hushed wind through the foliage.—Or: how Steve becomes a child of the woods
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Series: Forest Spirit Steve [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1527992
Comments: 7
Kudos: 61





	The Woods Know Him

Steve was raised by the woods his whole life. He knows the woods well and the woods know him.

As a toddler, left unwatched by preoccupied parents, he’d stumble with chubby little baby legs, unbalanced and adventurous, across the property line and into the line of trees, following the hushed wind through the foliage. 

The ground was always cushioned from layers of rotting leaves and twigs, offering a soft surface for him to catch himself with his hands and break his falls. When he would cry, the trees would coo at him with their rattling leaves and reaching branches — mother him in a way his mother couldn’t, drying his tears against his cheeks with light breezes until his eyes stopped their weeping. When he was scared, the brush would offer to hide him from sight, cradle his sniffling form and chase the fear away. When he was hungry, the bushes would offer him ripe berries to stain his fingers and mouth with, and flower nectar to suckle on. 

The woman is the house he’d sleep in wasn’t much of a mother at all. She’d obsess with the paranoid thoughts of a cheating husband too much to probably care for her child. She’d hold the baby bottle to his lips with one hand and hold a whiskey bottle to her own with the other, spending her time with him looking at him with a lost expression as he played with wooden building blocks on the ground that he struggled to grasp with his small hands and uncoordinated hands. Lost in her head. Lost in her thoughts. Looking at him but not seeing him. Rarely did the child hear her voice, rarely above an indecipherable muttering. 

The man in the immaculate suits and stoic expression wasn’t much of a father. He’d sleep in the room with an oak desk and piles of papers more often than in his own bed next to his wife. His forehead was permanently carved with horizontal wrinkles above his brow. His hair graying rapidly from being overworked. When the woman drank too much from her bottle, he’d hold the tiny boy against his expensive suits, paying no mind to the drooling mouth that suckled on his tie and babbled gibberish, holding him with one arm while the other flipped through paper piles, talking rapidly and firmly into the phone nestled against his ear and shoulder. Always talking on the phone, never talking to the baby. 

Steve’s first laugh was at 6 months and no one but the ticking grandfather clock and his building blocks were able to hear it. 

He said his first few words other than mama and papa when he was 3 and a half. His parents couldn’t figure out why it took their son longer to talk than most children or why he squirmed in his parents arms, unaccustomed to the feeling of being coddled. As if the woman didn’t let the child go on for hours crying in his crib alone with the spinning stars and moon from the mobile overhead as she sat in the kitchen, hands pressed tight over her ears to muffle the sound. ‘ _Please stop crying, I don’t know what you want, what do you want?_ ’. How, when she finally did peer over the crib at his wailing form, she’d cry too, touching her finger over his mouth and watching him suckle on it with a detached gaze. 

This little thing of snot of screeching lungs was supposed to be this... this light of joy and love, this sense of purpose and pride at having a healthy baby boy to care for. She kept waiting for the moment she’d look at him and feel like his mother, feel paternal towards this little thing.

But from the moment he was handed to her wrapped in the hospital blanket, cleaned of blood and face read of the exertion of his cries, she watched him latch onto her breast and she felt nothing. As if the this baby boy wasn’t hers, as if she didn’t carry him for 9 long months and spent hours of agonizing labor delivering him. It was the first and last time she fed him from her breast, prefering to feed him from the bottle. 

The day Steve stumbled into the woods and didn’t come back was a beautiful spring morning. His mother had smoked a cigarette outside and held a mug of coffee in the other, warming her hand against the cold dew of dawn. Her husband had left to work, leaving just her and little Steven alone. And as absent as her mind was, as distant and distracted as she had been for a while now, she left the sliding glass door open as she had the habit of doing. Steven was just leaving his crawling stage, later in age than most children, stumbling and falling as he went, stumbled right through the glass doors. The birds beckoned him around the the open water of the pool and sang in encouraging each time he picked himself up with tiny hands against the ground to continue waddling through the tree line. 

Stumbled right into the arms of the trees.

In the empty home, alone in those walls, the click of the woman’s kitten heels rang on the kitchen tile, then muffled on carpet as she searched for her wandering son. She saw the open door in the living room and sighed, knowing the boy liked to wander off into the woods. So she ventured in the woods, heels sinking into the dirt, clinging to her shoe stubborn in its effort to keep her out. She expects to find him a few steps in like always, under the shade of a big tree and sticking his hands into the dirt, making mud pies. 

And when she did not find him… when she did not find him....

She too stumbled through the woods, kicking off her heels against that stubborn earth and pushing her way through the branches that dragged on the fabric of her dress and scratched at her exposed skin. Her breathing loud in that too peaceful morning, the morning too warmth on her cold pale skin as she sobbed, tears raining on the earth floor. Her feet tracked mud and dirt through the carpet of her home and the stark white of the tiles, her hands trembled when she held the phone. 

She did not find him and she regretted all those nights she prayed for him to stop his crying, all those nights she prayed for him to leave her alone. 

All too late she felt like his mother — her son was lost somewhere in those woods — but her son never returned.

\----

Steve doesn’t remember his mother. 

He knows he must have had one, the woods told him as much. But to him, Mother was the waning moon that lit the night when he cried and bathed his skin in her light, chasing away the nightmares during the witching hour. Mother was trees and the bees that lived in the hollow trunk and fed him the sweetness of the honey, gave him honeycombs to stuff his cheeks with not unlike a chipmunk. Mother was the soil that caught his falls and made up his building blocks, that gave him clay to mold into tiny figurines of animals in the woods. Mother was Claudia, a black bear with warm fur that he clinged to when he was young, grabbed at her fur with his palms and layed on her back like a baby opossum, curling against her on the cold nights. 

Steve doesn’t remember his father. 

But there was a man…

There was a man in a cabin. He spent a large amount of time alone and Steve had wandered close with all the curiosity of a young boy. He peeked into the glass windows at the figure that moved within, standing on his tippy toes using a convenient bolder under the window for added height, barely reaching the window itself. The man with white hair and hard set back. He was much taller than Steve, it reminded him of the trees that reached into the sky, scraping the clouds with their branches, standing tall with all the power of a thick, strong, trunk. And through the glass, the man’s light eyes caught his own large earth brown ones before he could duck out of sight. 

In the distance, Steve heard the door of the cabin swing open followed by the thumps of the man’s steps down the porch, turning where Steve sat on the border, arms wrapped around his legs that were tucked up to his chest, long hair fanning around his face to peer up at this tree of a man. 

And the man looked down at the child, no more than six, covered in dry caking dirt and eyes wide like he caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.

**Author's Note:**

> To clear up confusion: 
> 
> Go easy on Steve’s mom, shes depressed (postpartum depression) and never reached out probably from feeling ashamed of her feelings. Her husband is too busy with work/absent to truly reach out or notice something is severely wrong. So she never ends up getting the help she needs.
> 
> The events after Steve disappears/ finding out what happens to the Harrington’s will come up after
> 
> And yes that is grandpa Hargrove at the end and mrs Henderson as a mother figure
> 
> Question now becomes: now that Steve is claimed by the woods, is he still fully human hmm
> 
> I’ll let y’all sit with that question till next chapter 
> 
> Tumblr is @ billy-baby


End file.
